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This Old (Open Source) House: Man Renovates Home on GitHub

Francis Irving manages his house on GitHub, the open source software repository that has evolved into something more.

Photo: Hakim Cassimally

When Mark Wainwright visited his friend Francis Irving in Liverpool last May, he nearly locked himself in his small guest room just beneath the attic. The door was missing a knob, but it could still latch shut. Wainwright, a community coordinator with a U.K. non-profit group, wanted to let his host know about the problem. So he filed a bug report on GitHub.

"The almost-attic room has no handle on the door," Wainwright wrote. "It would be simple to add a handle and would prevent someone getting locked in the room - quite easy at the moment as the sprung latch is working fine."

Most people think of GitHub as a website where you can upload your open source software and find and discuss interesting coding projects. But it's become much more than that. Based on the Git software that Linus Torvalds wrote nearly a decade ago to manage Linux, GitHub has branched out in unexpected ways. Over the past few years, it's been used to help write graphic novels, store codes of law, and even host one man's genetic data.

Francis Irving happens to use it as a bug-tracker for his three-story house.

"It's quite a nerdy thing to keep careful track of these things," he admits, but for him it makes him feel like he's on top of the problems that can creep into the 120-year-old Victorian. "For some people it might feel like a burden," he says. But Irving gets a sense of security from identifying and filing away known issues. It lets him put things out of his mind, knowing that his odd jobs are logged and will someday be quashed just like software bugs. And then there's that satisfying feeling of closing an issue ticket. That seems to a good feeling, whether you're talking about code or cracks in the plaster.

What's more, because everything is out in the open, Irving has received unsolicited bug reports, such as Wainwright's. He's even had tips on how to fix things like that noisy old radiator. "When someone recommends an electrician, I go and add it to the most boring electrical problem that I have," he says.

The activity on GitHub bears this out. In the year, he's been fixing up his house via GitHub, he (and a few other folks) have opened 82 issues relating to his house. And forty-six of them have been dealt with.

Some of the trouble tickets that other people have cooked up are clearly pranks. You run that risk when you put your entire fix-it list out in the open and allow anyone to tack something on. One joker told Irving he needed a guard monkey. Some other sourpuss told him that the entire exercise was a misuse of GitHub because Irving's to-do list contains no source code (GitHub, it just so happens, likes what Irving's doing).

Looking back, Irving says he's pretty happy with the issues he's fixed over the past year. "I'm not ruthlessly efficient at fixing them, that's for sure," he says. "On the other hand, that's not untypical of a software project"

And now, he's starting to inspire a few others. Just last week, Wilfried Schobeiri forked Irving's project and started his own household list on GitHub. He needs to double-check his smoke detector and fix that upstairs bathroom door.

A carpet corner plate, source code available.

Photo: Duane Johnson

Schobeiri has tried other task management programs like Habit List, but he likes GitHub because it's easy to use and open, and it lets him track what he's accomplished. And since it's all public, he might get some free advice. "Maybe there's someone else out there in the world who knows a little bit more than I do about the things I love or want to do," he says.

Or here's another possibility. Maybe these open task-lists will be adopted by landlords or owners of short-term rentals, says Brian Doll, GitHub's marketing manager. "Open collaboration is just a really, really interesting thing," he says. "I think once you experience it in one aspect of your life you very quickly start applying that to other things."

Schobeiri and Irving have found a cool and quirky use of GitHub, but a third forker, Duane Johnson, has taken the open-source house to a whole new level.

Johnson and his wife bought a place in Salt Lake City just three months ago. After nine years of renting they're excited to have a home they can call their own. But like Irving's, the new building wasn't perfect. The bathtub needed a new stopper, the kitchen sink needed an aerator, and the corners of living room rug tended to curl up and get stepped on. So Johnson – a programmer and 3-D printer enthusiast – simply hacked out some new parts to fix all of these issues using a design program called OpenSCAD and printed them out.

For Johnson, who works for an educational software company called Instructure, hardware hacking has a kind of heady excitement. "Once the whole hardware world opened up to me, I was like wow this is really cool," he says. "I can manipulate atoms."

Naturally, he's posted the source code to GitHub too. You can go there to get code for about a half-dozen of his household projects, including a cutlery tray, key holder, and the bathtub stopper.

So now anybody can take that code, fork it, and print out their own versions of Johnson's home improvements. It's a first step toward the open-source house, hacked out with one tiny modification at a time.

Right now his 3-D printer is plastic-only, but Johnson thinks that as the technology matures he'll be able to print things in more compelling materials – ceramics or wood. "As the technology becomes available i want to slowly convert my home into a place that we can make suit our own needs," he says. "We're just trying to see the benefits of being able to manufacture on your own."